Intel Core i9-9900KS: What Real Users Actually Think

Wait for benchmarks.

12 cores, 70MB of cache, 4.6GHz turbo, 105W TDP, PCIE 4.0, no security flaws, same price as 9900k for those who are catching up.

Will Intel's bloated, byzantine product stack ever make sense?

Seems a bit desperate, given that this will probably sell at like 600 bucks and even AMDs new midrange has almost double the threads.

Unless AMD lied through their teeth in the keynote, the only possible reason to take a 9900KS over a 3900X at this point is if you're running an old DAW that wasn't updated to handle higher memory latency.

9900k already draws way too much power, 8 cores with suspect thread support right now. 3900x looks to be much more power efficient, plus the additional 4 cores allows more growth potential as software goes more multi threaded. Single thread difference isn't that great anymore with Ryzens big IPC improvements.

Lets be realistic, it's 2-3 frames faster than a 9900K in games and gets annihilated by the Ryzen in productivity tests and it consumes a stupid amount of power. Why is this even a product release...

Re-releasing the fastest CPU is the boring part.

I wonder what its the minimal cooler needed to make this thing work, an expensive AIO, a huge noctua heatsink, I dont think that intel crappy heatsink work for this one.

At this point I feel way more confident that the 3900X won't have near the vulnerabilities that the 9900KS will likely have. That alone makes the 3900X the better CPU regardless of benchmarks. My trust in intel is broken.

The auto settings are often bad. Time to troubleshoot.

4 phases SOUNDS like 'not sufficient' for something as power hungry like the 9900 but honestly haven't done the math. Just googled! Holy shit we are at 65+ watt per phase! Could certainly be overheating VRMs.

I honestly think this SKU is the 'Don't let AMD take the performance crown' ringer.

This is what you can call desperation. Can't believe how much a company like intel is struggling so hard with this. You know what a reasonable response would be? Lowering prices.

It's the absolute best CPU you can get for the LGA 1151 V2 socket, thus it commands a premium as those still on that socket might be willing to pay that much to get the best CPU on that socket and hang on to their existing motherboard a while longer.

Yes, people are dumb.

Con: "Hard to compete with 3900X in some encoding and rendering workloads." Yeah... Considering it couldn't outperform even the 3700x in most of the workloads besides gaming I'd say that's an understatement...

The Keep Spending edition is still a good buy for people who don't want to spend several hundred dollars to buy a binned previous 'K' one from Silicon Lottery. Intel was genius to do this, because they knew full well people will buy these.

Industrial-grade air-conditioning system sold separately.

If it's for pure gaming, I wouldn't be surprised if the i9-9900KS still performed better. There's a latency penalty inherent to moving the memory controller off-die in Zen2. It might be mitigated somewhat with a big cache, but you can't beat the laws of physics.

RPCS3 utilized Intel TSX-NI and have seen Intel beaten Ryzen with a significant margin. Unless same optimization does with AMD, Intel will still be the king for that use case.

It depends on what FPS you want to play at. If you want 120+ FPS at 4k, then a 9900k is not enough. A 9900k will bottleneck a 3090/4090 in modern CPU-demanding games like BF2042 or in older games that rely on a few threads, like Crysis or Black Mesa.

It's not about the heatsink, it's about the solder. Short of sub-ambient you could throw any cooler on the planet in this thing and it won't help... the IHS is nice and cool but there's tons of heat trapped in the die. You're pushing on a string, the cooler isn't where the bottleneck is.

Heavily binned 14nm chip that produces 250w of heat? I hope Intel can get onto 10nm soon and leap from this rut they are in at the moment.

My 9900K hit 5.1 on all cores all the time pretty easily. And im still pretty new at the overclocking thing.

9900 is fine for 4k, (way lower CPU load at 4K vs 1080). If you are hardcore esports player @ 1080 then new CPU would show much more of a difference.

I sold my 9900K a few months ago for $350. I had it listed as an auction, not "Buy it now", so yes people are that stupid to pay for a 9900K.

I see Intel is starting to really sweat over all the Zen 2 leaks, but instead of actual solutions they resort to marketing ploys.

Think of it as 'out of print' and resellers are trying to make money on supply and demand. You should totally not buy one from these retailers. You can often get entire systems used with 9900k for the cost these people are fishing for just the chip 'new sealed in box'.

It's now 2026 and I can explain the (now much better) logic since I myself am considering buying a 9900KS for $350 to upgrade my i7 9700K. Simple: lazy + DDR5 RAM prices are now $300+ for 32GB which I would need for a new Ryzen build. It would be a quick drop-in upgrade. Wouldn't have to do a full system rebuild and shell out even more than $300 for new DDR5 RAM alone. Recently upgraded to an RTX 5070 Ti and my 9700K with only 8 threads is bottlenecking it pretty hard in some games.

Had a 9900KS and Maximus Hero X and it ran without issue at 5.2ghz all cores. The X had better VRMs than the Z390 XI so that is not the issue at all. I would ensure you're on latest BIOS, enter bios and load optimized defaults and go from there.

JaystwoCents had this same issue where he ran the cpu on stock settings and the cpu didn't like it, so he overclocked the cpu and it started to run fine. So I think you need to put a slight overclock maybe.

The performance it offers at that price point is insanely bad, its price alone is enough to buy a cpu, mobo, ram, ssd, cooler, case and psu that offer similar performance to the 9900KS.

I had a 9900 ks @ 5.2 GHz all core and 32gb ddr4 @ 4133 cl 16-16-16-36 and it bottlenecked my 3080 in some games and bottlenecked my 3090 ti pretty bad even in 1440p. 12900 ks @ 5.4 solved that.

People have this weird aversion to replacing their entire computer, regardless of how much sense it actually makes. I think it's the psychological effect of justifying it being an 'upgrade' over it being a 'big system purchase' and being too lazy to actually rip everything apart as opposed to a drop-in replacement. Short answer: It's dumb and people are dumb.

Ignorant people and fanboys that think amd still is in the FX era. With 300 you can reuse your ram and can get you a 5700x3d and a b550 mobo that is much faster than 9900k and a more up to date platform with features or a 12th gen intel i5.

Collectors item I assume, also gotta think they're listed super high but are they actually selling? For the price of a used 9900KS you can get a 12600k and motherboard, where the i5 just slaps the i9 around while having more cores.

Clockspeed is usually a big deal for emulation in particular. A lot of the emulators don't use very many cores. If emulation is a big thing for you I would swap to the 9900 for certain.

The difference in performance will be tiny, it depends on how much you want a 5% performance gain (+/- 5%) for about 600-700$.

I was on a 9700k and swapped to a 9900KS on the same board. It required a BIOS update in order to work. It was seeing the KS as a normal K and it threw the voltage off enough to cause serious issues. Even defaults didn't work. The board chucked in 1.4v at idle which is absurd. Update fixed the problem with voltages. After that came the VRM heat issues which were fun. It would tap 105c and shut down the PC.

Stock made it blue screen. 'Overclocking' doesn't. Go figure.

Get a z390 board and you should be fine. I've got a z390 Aorus Master paired with my 9900ks and run all cores at 5 ghz with no problem.